By Heidi Walter
I met this mom through our Family and Natural Supports work, and when I asked if I could share her story she said yes right away. She wants people to hear it. She is from a rural community in the United States, so not the Canadian context we usually write about, but I don’t think that matters much here. I’ve kept her and her daughter anonymous.
She and her 14-year-old daughter were homeless and living together in a tent. She was living in poverty and struggling with substance use, and she had grown up in a small rural community, so when they got to the city she had no idea how to get around (she had never even seen a city bus). But she knew what her daughter needed. Somewhere to go to school, somewhere to shower, somewhere to charge her phone and feel safe. She did not want homelessness to take her daughter’s education away from her.
She found a youth-serving organization online. The website said nothing about parents or how families would be included, and that scared her.
“Why don’t they mention parents? What is happening in there that I’m not allowed to know about? Why aren’t they including me?”
She sat with the decision for months. In the end she let her daughter go into the program, not because she wanted to step back from being a parent but because she wanted her daughter to have what she couldn’t give her in a tent.
“This was the hardest decision I had to make.”
When she brought her daughter in, the staff met her at the door and told her she could be part of the process. She was the mom, and whatever else was going on in her life, her love for her daughter was obvious to them.
“I can’t be treated as less than human. I wasn’t doing all the things I was supposed to be doing as a parent, but I also didn’t know how to do those things. It mattered that the organization didn’t judge me. The staff let me in.”
And that didn’t stop after the first day. Staff kept including her in conversations, kept respecting her role as the parent and made sure she was part of the decisions about her daughter’s health, her education and what came next. They never positioned themselves as the experts in her child’s life.
Trust took a long time. Months, she told me, close to a year.
“It didn’t happen all at once. They showed me something different, that maybe people aren’t all the same. Trust doesn’t look like someone being nice to me one time. It looks like someone being kind to me consistently. That’s what I watched for. It’s easy to be nice once.”
“My dog was the first living being to show me unconditional love, so that was how I knew what it was supposed to feel like. But I had never seen or felt that from another person.”
Eventually the consistency got through. She started reaching out, started accepting support, started letting people walk alongside her, and the whole time she was still being treated as her daughter’s mother.
Today her daughter is getting ready to graduate from high school. Both of them are housed, and they are living together again.
I keep thinking about how differently this could have gone. The organization could have focused on the young person in front of them and left Mom outside, and honestly a lot of places would have. Instead they treated her as someone who needed dignity, practical help and time to build trust, and they gave her all three. They didn’t replace her family. They made it possible for that family to come back together.
That is what Family and Natural Supports actually looks like on the ground, and it starts earlier than most of us think. It starts with what your website says about parents, or doesn’t. It starts with how staff greet a mom at the door. And it depends on people showing up the same way over and over again, for as long as it takes.
At A Way Home Canada we work with communities across the country, and with partners beyond our borders, on bringing Family and Natural Supports into how youth homelessness is prevented and addressed. If you want to learn more about FNS or the training we offer, you can find it here.